The left's take on Russian election meddling is basically correct - 7/30/18

Leftist writers and activists are still generally skeptical of allegations that the Russian government significantly influenced the outcome of the 2016 election. Their liberal counterparts, predictably, find this inconvenient. And now, of course, the dialectic of Russiagate has given us a synthesis: a handful of leftists who voice some skepticism of the liberal position, but who insist that their leftist comrades are getting it wrong, too.

I'm not going to wade through all of the nuance and hedging in this latest genre of take, but I do want to touch on one issue that's emerged time and time again. David Klion insists that "Russian interference was real and significant."

It isn’t clear that Russia influenced the outcome of the 2016 election...But it seems increasingly likely that there will be more hacks, and the consequences could be more explosive than John Podesta’s risotto recipe.

...whoever wins the 2020 Democratic primary...is highly likely to face a serious campaign of dirty tricks from Russian intelligence...It probably won't move that many people, but Trump only won by less than 100,000 votes spread across three states. It's a threat that needs to be reckoned with.

What do all of these takes have in common? All three writers call for policy responses to the threat of Kremlin meddling - and justify this by entertaining theories that the Kremlin had a significant influence on 2016's outcome. And for that reason, all three takes are factually not credible.

What We Know About Kremlin Vote Acquisition In 2016

Three simple points.

1) There is still no direct evidence that the Kremlin managed to change election 2016's outcome.

The task is simple: one has to prove that Russian influence operations won Trump at least 35 votes in the electoral college. This means crediting the Kremlin for his margin of victory in enough states to give him those votes. There are all kinds of ways that you could set about drawing a line from the Kremlin to those margins - and yet no one has actually done this.

Look at our major media outlets, and you might think otherwise. Through blatant implication and just-so proclamation, our pundits routinely declare that the matter has been proven; and even the judicious agnosticism of "it isn't clear" statements can create the impression that there is some real controversy at hand. But this is not a matter of contradictory studies creating uncertainty, or of researchers establishing a probability and skeptics demanding proof - the problem here is that no one has successfully made the specific demonstration that needs to be made. Look for yourself: the studies just aren't there.

2) There is not even direct evidence that the Kremlin even managed to win Trump 10,704 votes in Michigan.
This is the same point that I made above, but I want to press on it a bit to show how flimsy the Russiagate narrative is. Routinely, the left's critics point to just how small Trump's vote margins were as proof that Kremlin meddling probably made a difference. That's why Cooper writes that "Trump only won by less than 100,000 votes spread across three states. It's a threat that needs to be reckoned with." Elsewhere, Kevin Drum puts it explicitly:

given how close the election was, there’s a pretty good chance that Putin’s campaign of cyber-chaos had enough oomph to swing things all by itself.

This logic is absurd. The likelihood of a Kremlin-swung election depends on the size of vote margins and the Kremlin's absolute capacity to win Trump votes. And that latter point - not the size of the vote margins - is obviously the point in dispute. Even if we focus on Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, where Trump won by the narrowest of margins, there's just no reason to take for granted that the Kremlin won the votes he needed. Not even in Michigan, where Trump just won by 10,704 votes.

Again: the bottom line here is that we have no research, no polling analysis, no systematic investigation of probable ROIs that takes into consideration Russian spending, message propagation, and estimates of votes earned - nothing that demonstrates over 10,000 votes won by the Kremlin in Michigan. The left's critics can talk about denialism or call for agnosticism all they like, but this remains an extraordinary claim that lacks even ordinary evidence.

3. There is significant reason to believe that the Kremlin did not change 2016's outcome.
Let's stay with Michigan. Here's what we do know:

Throughout the month of October - when the Podesta Emails, allegedly a major prong in the Kremlin's influence operation, were released - Hillary Clinton's numbers in Michigan actually improved. [1] This is consistent with Mike Enten's observation for FiveThirtyEight about the national trend:

Clinton’s drop in the polls doesn’t line up perfectly with the surge in WikiLeaks interest. When WikiLeaks had its highest search day in early October, Clinton’s poll numbers were rising. They continued to go up for another two weeks, even as WikiLeaks was releasing emails.

In the same article, Enten relies on Google trends to argue that "Americans were clearly paying attention to the WikiLeaks releases". Thomas Ferguson, however, observes that

outside of Washington, D.C., it is not obvious that that these details engrossed many voters, particularly in the battleground states...This claim is testable...Google Trends allows one to compare the relative volume of searches on topics by state and time.

The evidence seems to bear this out in Michigan: there, interest in the Podesta emails was less than half what it was in DC. And this, in turn, supports a common intuition on the left: a lot of the palace intrigue and media controversy that captivates our pundit class just isn't that interesting to the rest of the country.

To put this into perspective, a widely-circulated investigation by Business Insider concluded "that to sway about 10,700 voters you'd need a budget of $42,800." And even this number was (correctly) dismissed as "fantastical" and "utter bullshit" by reporters and digital marketers; as NYMag's Brian Feldman pointed out, the $42,800 figure "represents an absolute edge-case scenario, in which Facebook ads are supernaturally effective and persuasive", winning over Trump voters at $4 per voter. So even with that kind of magical RoI, we have, at best, evidence that the Kremlin might have won over 206 voters - less than 2% of what it needed.

That's what the case looks like in Michigan, where the lift for anyone who wants to argue for decisive Kremlin interference is the lightest. Elsewhere, of course, the burden gets even heavier: by the time you get to Pennsylvania, you have to argue that the Kremlin won more than four times as many votes for Trump as it needed in Michigan. Generally, the reasons to doubt that this happened are identical across the board: no analysis suggesting adequate investments or capacity on the part of Russia, and significant evidence that it was nowhere near up to the task.

What This Means For Critics of the Skeptical Left

So where does this leave the left and its critics? In general, I think it demonstrates that the left's take on Russian election meddling is basically correct, and has been for quite some time.

The question at hand is whether Kremlin influence operations in the United States warrant a significant policy response from the left. You could, I suppose, make absolutist arguments about protecting the integrity of our elections from even one sullied vote - but generally, even the left's critics tend to recognize that it's worth asking whether the Russian government actually swung our election. If they didn't even manage to do that, one begins to wonder why we should prioritize Kremlin meddling over voter impersonation or the malevolent propagandizing of Lyndon LaRouche.

As far as I can tell, that is the question still facing critics of the skeptical left. There may very well be legitimate grounds for arguing that the left should change its politics towards Russia, but if critics want to argue that the Kremlin elected Trump, their work is still ahead of them.